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Reconsidering Laura Ingalls Wilder: Little House and Beyond
Reconsidering Laura Ingalls Wilder: Little House and Beyond
Reconsidering Laura Ingalls Wilder: Little House and Beyond
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Reconsidering Laura Ingalls Wilder: Little House and Beyond

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Contributions by Emily Anderson, Elif S. Armbruster, Jenna Brack, Christine Cooper-Rompato, Christiane E. Farnan, Melanie J. Fishbane, Vera R. Foley, Sonya Sawyer Fritz, Miranda A. Green-Barteet, Anna Thompson Hajdik, Keri Holt, Shosuke Kinugawa, Margaret Noodin, Anne K. Phillips, Dawn Sardella-Ayres, Katharine Slater, Lindsay Stephens, and Jericho Williams

Reconsidering Laura Ingalls Wilder: Little House and Beyond offers a sustained, critical examination of Wilder's writings, including her Little House series, her posthumously published and unrevised The First Four Years, her letters, her journalism, and her autobiography, Pioneer Girl. The collection also draws on biographies of Wilder, letters to and from Wilder and her daughter, collaborator and editor Rose Wilder Lane, and other biographical materials. Contributors analyze the current state of Wilder studies, delineating Wilder's place in a canon of increasingly diverse US women writers, and attending in particular to issues of gender, femininity, space and place, truth, and collaboration, among other issues.

The collection argues that Wilder's work and her contributions to US children's literature, western literature, and the pioneer experience must be considered in context with problematic racialized representations of peoples of color, specifically Native Americans. While Wilder's fiction accurately represents the experiences of white settlers, it also privileges their experiences and validates, explicitly and implicitly, the erasure of Native American peoples and culture. The volume’s contributors engage critically with Wilder's writings, interrogating them, acknowledging their limitations, and enhancing ongoing conversations about them while placing them in context with other voices, works, and perspectives that can bring into focus larger truths about North American history. Reconsidering Laura Ingalls Wilder examines Wilder's strengths and weaknesses as it discusses her writings with context, awareness, and nuance.
LanguageEnglish
Release dateJun 18, 2019
ISBN9781496823090
Reconsidering Laura Ingalls Wilder: Little House and Beyond

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  • Rating: 1 out of 5 stars
    1/5
    I want to start out by saying I am an indigenous woman. My father is full Kānaka maoli or Native Hawaiian. I consider myself liberal but am not a fan of extremism on either side. I recognize there is some problematic history with the Little House series, though I still adored them as a child and see the positives alongside those problems in the books today. Rose's hard core libertarianism which is more neo-con than anything did result in editing that flew over my head as a keiki that I now see today. Basically I am a fan of Laura Ingalls Wilder and her books but am not blind to some of the issues they have.

    That said this entire collection redefines reaching. Instead of an understandable discussion of the pros and cons in the books and editing, these mostly white individuals rally with all the overwrought, barely comprehensible neo posy modern type language resulting in something that is barely readable. For instance the first essay repeated over and over that the main issue is of repetition to create ideology. If that's the case Wilder's books are far more successful than the essay in the book, having no sense of the irony of their incomprehensible repetition that proves nothing because there's never an actual point.

    These essays try too hard to be hip and modern with made up language and problems that result in a failed attempt to prove anything sensibly because they are too caught up in their own satisfied la la land where they believe things like "repetition " are unwoke. Its ironic that white academics see this as defending PoC, we have enough real problems in our lives we don't need this made up nonsense.

    5 people found this helpful

  • Rating: 1 out of 5 stars
    1/5
    Tearing apart a legend due to the trend for self appointed white liberal apologists makes it easy to skip this piece of trash

    2 people found this helpful

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Reconsidering Laura Ingalls Wilder - University Press of Mississippi

INTRODUCTION

Miranda A. Green-Barteet and Anne K. Phillips

In 2015, five literary scholars gathered in Philadelphia to discuss Laura Ingalls Wilder. This roundtable, included on the program for the Society for the Study of American Women Writers Triennial Conference, was organized for several reasons. Most of the panelists grew up reading Wilder’s Little House series. A number have also presented on, contributed articles and dissertation chapters to, reviewed, and otherwise followed Wilder scholarship. The panelists were focused on critically considering Wilder’s current place in North American literary studies.

The panel was inspired by the publication of Pioneer Girl: The Annotated Autobiography (2014), Wilder’s unpublished work from which she drew and adapted the content of her Little House series, annotated and introduced by Pamela Smith Hill and published by the South Dakota Historical Society Press. Miranda particularly was struck by the contrast between the autobiography’s astonishing commercial success and the relative lack of critical attention paid to Wilder’s writings, finding this juxtaposition emblematic of the way critics have historically dismissed many commercially successful women writers, a reality that especially affects women writing for children. Seeing the conference as a venue that would welcome conversations about Wilder’s place in US literary scholarship and the ongoing recovery work surrounding overlooked women writers, Miranda organized the roundtable with the goal of participating in a sustained and cogent analysis of Wilder’s work, particularly in light of Pioneer Girl’s publication.

The roundtable was held in the conference hotel’s smallest meeting room, and the panelists didn’t expect the room to fill. In fact, they were concerned that individuals interested only in celebrating Wilder’s work would attend, thereby making it difficult to have a critical discussion. But the room did fill, and those who attended didn’t come to celebrate Wilder. Most attendees were scholars working on other sometimes canonical but often historically overlooked American women writers, including Emily Dickinson, Maria Cummins, Sarah Winnemucca, and Maria Ruiz de Burton. These scholars asked, among many questions, why Wilder had not received the critical attention accorded many of her contemporaries. The resulting conversation convinced the panelists, Miranda and Anne especially, of the need to explore several issues.

Specifically, what is the current state of Wilder studies? How do Wilder’s books engage in conversation with works of other writers of her era? How does Wilder’s fiction influence readers’ awareness of nineteenth-century gender roles? What is Wilder’s impact on children from a variety of backgrounds who are reading her books, both inside and outside classrooms as well as on their own and with adults? The panelists and their audience raised more specific questions: What role does truth play in readers’ views of Wilder? Are scholars hesitant to consider Wilder through critical frameworks because of the series’ blending of fact and fiction? Does fans’ seeming sense of ownership over Wilder’s legacy discourage scholars from engaging critically with her novels? Will Pioneer Girl, previously only available at scholarly archives, inspire more specific comparisons between the autobiography and the fiction that ensued from it as well as critical analysis of Wilder’s other autobiographical writings? Finally, how should the works’ collaborative nature be acknowledged, especially given continuing developments in the scholarship concerning Rose Wilder Lane’s role in writing the series?

While considering these questions, we also knew that we must acknowledge the central issue in scholarly consideration of Wilder’s work in our era. Given problematic representations of Native peoples, should her work merit greater critical consideration? In 2018, the Association for Library Service to Children (ALSC), a division of the American Library Association (ALA), established a task force to consider removing Wilder’s name from an award recognizing substantial and lasting contribution to literature for children (Lindsay). The award was created to honor Wilder in 1954, but in the six plus decades since, as Nina Lindsay put it, the ALSC board has come to recognize that Wilder’s legacy is complex and that her work is not universally embraced. It continues to be a focus of scholarship and literary analysis, which often brings to light anti-Native and anti-Black sentiments in her work. The ALSC Board recognizes that legacy may no longer be consistent with the intention of the award named for her. On 23 June 2018, the board voted to rename the Laura Ingalls Wilder Award the Children’s Literature Legacy Award. The organization explained that changing the award’s name did not represent an attempt to censor, limit, or deter access to Wilder’s books; rather, it constituted an effort to have the award represent the ALSC’s principles. According to the Legacy Award’s new website, the decision reflects the fact that Wilder’s legacy, as represented by her body of work, includes expressions of stereotypical attitudes inconsistent with ALSC’s core values of inclusiveness, integrity and respect, and responsiveness. As an ASLC member wrote to Lindsay, the Wilder [Award] is a monument that says something about our profession’s history, but every year it is given out it also says something about our present (Lindsay). The sentiments expressed by Lindsay, the member she quotes, and the ALSC Board point to the ways Wilder privileged the white settler experience and validated, both explicitly and implicitly, the erasure of Native American peoples and culture through her stereotypical representations of them as primitive, violent, and ignorant.

These concerns resonate with many of our own. How could we argue for Wilder’s inclusion in a more diverse canon of US women writers given her problematic and racist representations of peoples of color generally and Native Americans specifically? Should we argue for the series’ inclusion, particularly since we have read and respect powerful, insightful assessments of Wilder’s perspective and work produced by Native scholars such as Frances W. Kaye, Debbie Reese, and Waziyatawin Angela Cavender Wilson? These scholars, among many others, offer compelling critiques that need to be more widely read and acknowledged. Wilson, for example, writes with outrage and eloquence that Wilder crafted a narrative that transformed the horror of white supremacist genocidal thinking and the stealing of Indigenous lands into something noble, virtuous, and absolutely beneficial to humanity (67). Wilson and other scholars have articulated a context for the Little House books that cannot—and should not—be ignored.

Ultimately, we believe we must continue to engage in scholarly conversations about Wilder’s life and work and her representations of US history. While engaging in that difficult but necessary work, we must continue to welcome and learn from all who wish to participate in such conversations. The answer is not simply to put away Wilder’s work but to engage with it analytically. We can acknowledge its enduring appeal for many readers, but we also must interrogate it, delineate its limitations, enhance the conversations that scholars, teachers, and fans are having about it, and place it in context with other voices and works that can bring into focus the larger truths of our history. In doing so, we aspire to enrich the existing critical conversation, offer a forum accessible and pertinent to Wilder’s fans, and generate perspectives and strategies that will enable teachers, librarians, and others to talk more effectively with child readers about Wilder’s strengths and weaknesses and about how to read her works with context, awareness, and nuance.

Reconsidering Laura Ingalls Wilder: Little House and Beyond explicitly acknowledges and examines the series’ representation of Native American and African American characters. Native and nonnative contributors work to chart the implications of these issues for contemporary audiences. For example, in her essay in this volume, Vera Foley concludes that although Wilder infuses her novels with motifs and imagery comparable to those used by Native authors such as Mourning Dove and Charles Alexander Eastman, she employs Native elements not to establish a historical record but to signify aspects of her own emotional and psychological experience as a young girl caught between the influence of a genteel mother and an unstable frontier—a perspective different from Bethany Schneider’s suggestion that Little House on the Prairie has engaged in both ontological and epistemological cannibalism from Zitkála-Šá’s autobiographical stories (67). In her essay discussing the spin-off novels, particularly the Caroline books of the 1990s–2000s, Sonya Sawyer Fritz acknowledges that while Native characters are included, the texts always cast Indians as the primitive Other. Jenna Brack posits in her essay that Wilder’s and Lane’s references to the neighbor child’s scalping of Charlotte, Laura’s doll, in On the Banks of Plum Creek seemingly acknowledge Euro-American violence against indigenous peoples and criticizes the cruelty of white settlers. However, Brack argues, "even Laura’s sympathy ultimately reflects an attitude of possession and furthers a white savior narrative. After Laura rescues the helpless doll, she brings Charlotte back into her home and her culture, where the doll is remade to more closely reflect an Ingalls family ideal. Asked whether she sees any separation between Laura’s perspective and the attitudes articulated by others or any meaningful alignment of Laura with Native perspectives—arguments raised by scholars in response to Native critiques—Margaret Noodin explained privately, I think Laura does occasionally view the land differently than some of her family and certainly some of her peers, but she does not connect with the land in the way that the native cultures do. She does question her parents, but this mostly shows she was intelligent, inquisitive and eager to learn. I don’t think there is any indication that she connects her view of the land with the ‘Indians’ or that she views the wolves or the water or stars as equals to herself." The conclusions independently reached by these scholars, then, acknowledge, attend to, and validate perspectives that have addressed the explicit and implicit racism of Wilder’s novels.

It is essential to address such issues even as we recognize that strikingly diverse audiences will read this collection. As the reaction to the renaming of the Children’s Literature Legacy Award demonstrates, scholars and fans on all sides have intense, personal feelings about Wilder and her works. This passion demonstrates that the Little House series remains firmly embedded within North American culture. In part, it endures because of its publisher’s active involvement in maintaining its relevance.¹ HarperCollins’s publication of spin-off novels involving Laura’s mother, grandmother, great-grandmother, and daughter ensures that Little House remains competitive with other historical fiction for child readers, including the Dear America and American Girl series. Additionally, picture book versions of Little House books, containing illustrations similar to Garth Williams’s work for the 1953 uniform edition, invite young readers into the franchise. Other cultural artifacts cater to adults’ nostalgia for the series, including cookbooks, songbooks, and recordings of the material Pa Ingalls played on his fiddle as well as occasional live performances of that music.² Diverse social media networks and postings keep Wilder’s life and works at the forefront: in June 2018, for example, a recipe for Laura’s wedding cake was shared across Facebook.³ A Laurapalooza convention is held annually. Tourist sites from Wisconsin to South Dakota maintain Wilder-themed attractions that draw domestic and international visitors. Much traffic stems from the continued appeal of the NBC television series (1974–83), but other adaptations perpetuate interest, including plays, a musical, and a six-hour Disney miniseries (2005).⁴ The novels have also inspired much Wilder-related nonfiction, such as Jeannine Atkins’s Borrowed Names: Poems about Laura Ingalls Wilder, Madam C. J. Walker, Marie Curie, and Their Daughters (2010), Wendy McClure’s The Wilder Life: My Adventures in the Lost World of Little House on the Prairie (2011), Kelly Kathleen Ferguson’s My Life as Laura: How I Searched for Laura Ingalls Wilder and Found Myself (2011), Nancy McCabe’s From Little Houses to Little Women: Revisiting a Literary Childhood (2014), Bich Minh Nguyen’s Pioneer Girl (2014), Marie Tschopp’s Mary Ingalls—The College Years (2017), Sarah Miller’s Caroline: Little House, Revisited (2017), and other tributes too numerous to mention. This list doesn’t account for Wilder’s international popularity. Her books have been translated into numerous languages, inspiring multitudes of adaptations, including a Japanese anime series, Laura, the Prairie Girl.⁵

Simultaneously, the past few decades have seen a relative boom in scholarship dedicated to Wilder’s life and works. Ann Romines’s Constructing the Little House: Gender, Culture, and Laura Ingalls Wilder (1997) set a high standard for literary and cultural analysis of the series and remains an essential resource for Wilder scholars. Anita Clair Fellman’s often-quoted study of how the Little House series has been represented in classrooms and in popular/political discourse, Little House, Long Shadow: Laura Ingalls Wilder’s Impact on American Culture (2008), is another scholarly touchstone. In 2012, the Library of America published a two-volume authoritative edition of the series prepared by Caroline Fraser. Wilder’s Selected Letters (2016), edited by William Anderson, makes available resources previously accessible only at research sites such as the Herbert Hoover Presidential Library and Museum in West Branch, Iowa; the Detroit Public Library; and the Wilder Home and Museum in Mansfield, Missouri.

These resources and others promote new awareness of Wilder’s works, but they also contribute essential evidence to the fierce debate regarding Rose Wilder Lane’s role in writing the series. William Holtz’s 1993 monograph, The Ghost in the Little House: A Life of Rose Wilder Lane, famously claimed that Lane was the series’ primary author. Among other scholarly responses, John E. Miller’s Becoming Laura Ingalls Wilder: The Woman behind the Legend (1998) provided archival evidence to challenge and qualify Holtz’s conclusion, specifically tracing what each author contributed to the series. Recently, Christine Woodside’s Libertarians on the Prairie: Laura Ingalls Wilder, Rose Wilder Lane, and the Making of the Little House Books (2016) expands Holtz’s argument, offering specific textual evidence supporting claims that Lane played a central role in the series’ creation, transform[ing] the whole of her mother’s life by removing many parts and changing details where necessary to suit an idealized version of the pioneer story (xvi).

Pioneer Girl’s epic success has ensured that the South Dakota Historical Society Press’s Pioneer Girl Project will complete other planned ventures dedicated to exploring [Wilder’s] life and works (Pioneer Girl Project), including some focusing on the series’ authorship. Edited by Nancy Tystad Koupal, Pioneer Girl Perspectives (2017), the second of four planned volumes, features new scholarship from respected North American Wilder scholars, including Elizabeth Jameson, Fraser, Miller, and Romines. Fraser’s essay on Lane’s training in yellow journalism is particularly useful when considering questions about authorship and collaboration, and Pioneer Girl Perspectives has already inspired new analysis of Wilder’s and Lane’s works. Finally, Fraser’s comprehensive historical biography, Prairie Fires: The American Dreams of Laura Ingalls Wilder (2017), is receiving deserved acclaim, including a Pulitzer Prize, and assuredly will influence future Wilder studies.

With the majority of scholarship directed specifically at Wilder’s life rather than her literary works, deciding to assemble a volume of essays focusing on her writings was relatively easy. Determining the collection’s scope was not. While we acknowledge the role Wilder’s fans have played in maintaining her relevance, we weren’t interested in compiling essays that simply celebrated the author. Rather, we wanted to showcase innovative theoretical lenses and analytical approaches to offer scholars, teachers, students, and fans new ways to consider Wilder and the very specific view of US settler history that her books present. These essays demonstrate such approaches. Often, they highlight how Wilder’s books normalize settler colonialism generally and specifically the experiences of white settlers, especially women and children, while eliding Native peoples, perspectives, and cultures. The contributors to this volume also examine Wilder’s emphasis on women’s agency and independence while recognizing that Wilder had a conflicted relationship with feminism and women’s suffrage.

The essays are organized according to central themes that resonate with experienced and emerging scholars of Wilder’s works. Part 1, Wilder and Truth, considers how the series matches (and often challenges) the historical record and how the autobiography and the fiction convey distinct, almost contradictory, messages. Although Wilder and Lane attested that the series was true, scholarship has shown that the fiction omits or alters much factual information about the Ingalls family. In fact, Wilder’s letters and other writings acknowledge that the fiction is not entirely true. Following Pioneer Girl’s publication, for example, many readers were upset to learn that Jack, Laura’s beloved pet, didn’t die of old age shortly before the family left Minnesota. Rather, Wilder writes that as the family departed the Osage Diminished Reserve, Jack wanted to stay with Pet and Patty as he always did [so] Pa gave him to the man who had them (22).⁷ Fraser succinctly acknowledges that Wilder’s and Lane’s concept of truth, both in their lives and writings, was elastic, reflect[ing] not objective reality but something closer to felt experience (236).

The volume’s first essay, Katharine Slater’s "‘Play It Again, Pa’: Repetition in Pioneer Girl: The Annotated Autobiography and Little: Novels," addresses truth in the Little House series. Slater considers fans’ and scholars’ assertions that Wilder’s books capture and preserve an authentic nineteenth-century settler experience, arguing that the series possesses no core truth but instead relies on "ceaseless acts of repetition that generate rhizomatic offshoots that engage with its settler colonial worldview. These acts of repetition—literary and cultural—are ultimately responsible for building the semblance of truth." Slater develops her argument by comparing Pioneer Girl to Emily Anderson’s Little: Novels (2015), which reimagines and exhumes Wilder’s Little House novels.

In ‘It All Depends on How You Look at It’: Laura Ingalls Wilder, Rose Wilder Lane, Independence Day, and Family Economics, Dawn Sardella-Ayres asserts that scholars have yet to fully delineate the subtle differences between Wilder’s and Lane’s political ideologies or the ways they occur in the two women’s shared and individual work. Focusing on a key phrase repeated throughout the series, free and independent, Sardella-Ayres argues that the words mean something different for each collaborator: "For Wilder, the notion is personal and/or familial, grounded in her family’s physical situation on the open prairie land[, and] has economic connotations: to be as free from debt as possible. In contrast, Lane’s idea of being free and independent is more individualistic and theoretical, conveying a psychological or spiritual independence." Sardella-Ayres fleshes out her analysis by comparing draft and final versions of the Fourth of July episodes from Farmer Boy and Little Town on the Prairie, including context from Pioneer Girl and The First Four Years along with Lane’s single-authored works.

In The Complicated Politics of Disability: Reading the Little House Books and Helen Keller, Keri Holt and Christine Cooper-Rompato contrast Wilder’s representation of Mary’s blindness in the Pioneer Girl manuscript and the fictional series, noting that in Pioneer Girl, Wilder treats Mary’s blindness as a factual event in her life, rather than a focus for extended attention [and] primarily represents her experiences in terms of loss and limitation. In the series, however, a very different Mary emerges, encapsulating Wilder’s attitude toward truth in her fiction. Wilder transforms Mary’s disability into an experience that no longer separates her from society or limits her involvement within it. Aligning Wilder’s depiction of disability with the work and activism of Helen Keller, these scholars delineate a shared engagement with the politics of disability that offers a new lens for considering the cultural and political influence of Wilder’s work [and] the complicated consequences of her representations.

Part 2, Wilder and Constructions of Gender, addresses Elizabeth Jameson’s call for accurate Western stories, in which adult women play important roles, in which family settlement is not the end of the frontier adventure but the beginning of the important task of building human social relationships. We need to imagine stories in which our real mothers and grandmothers helped create the West we inherited. We need to hear their stories (51). Wilder creates an alternate model of mature US femininity that negotiates the outdoor space and the indoor, more conventionally domestic space and that purposefully challenges the model of womanhood embodied by her mother.

Contributors Vera Foley and Jenna Brack are inspired by the same (notorious) passage from the end of Little House on the Prairie in which an uncharacteristically assertive Laura demands an Indian baby—the scene from the series that has perhaps evoked the most commentary by scholars. Moving in separate directions from that starting (and startling) point, Foley and Brack offer significant new observations. In Naked Horses on the Prairie: Laura Ingalls Wilder’s Imagined Anglo-Indian Womanhood, Foley asserts that the significant element in this scene is the unbridled happy pony. She then extrapolates from the scene throughout the series’ other books, arguing that by constructing for herself an American legacy of freedom and partnership in the form of the naked Indian ponies of her childhood, Wilder models the process by which a girl on the frontier may reshape ideas about femininity and coming of age to honor the pursuit of liberty and happiness.

Brack, in contrast, focuses on the baby and its significance to Laura, interrogating in "Her Own Baby: Dolls and Family in ‘Indians Ride Away’ the racial subtexts of Laura’s doll, Charlotte, and the racial, gendered, and familial dynamics of the Ingalls family. Brack demonstrates that Laura’s response to the Indian baby might be read as a desire for her own baby, in opposition to Ma’s claim that the family has ‘our own baby’ (Prairie 310; emphasis added)" and contends that the idea of the baby offers Laura compensation for displacement within her own family. Brack extends Robin Bernstein’s influential research on racialized play to representations of Native Americans in children’s literature and culture.

Part 2 also includes Laura’s Lineage: The Matrilineal Legacy of Laura Ingalls Wilder’s Little House Narratives, a critical analysis of nearly two dozen spin-off novels about Laura’s matrilineal descendants and ancestors published in the 1990s and early 2000s. The first scholar to explicitly focus on these supplements to Wilder’s series, Sonya Sawyer Fritz draws on Sanne Parlevliet’s definition of historical fiction as a cultural practice that brings images of the past into circulation (354), asking, How then do the images of the past that [these spin-offs] circulate interact with Wilder’s presentation of history to shape American collective memory and reinforce or revise Wilder’s place in the story of America’s origin? Fritz concludes that while the spin-off Little House books do share women’s stories, and … recast a portion of American history that has traditionally been traced through men, they replicate the failures of Wilder’s series by ignor[ing] intersections of race and gender and privileging the views of Anglo-American mothers and daughters. In doing so, these new series relinquish one mythic version of history so that another can take its place; together, they amplify and crystallize the notion, latent in Wilder’s fictionalized accounts of her own girlhood—that the history of America is comprised of the girlhoods of its white mothers.

In Laura’s ‘Farmer Boy’: Fictionalizing Almanzo Wilder in the Little House Series, Melanie J. Fishbane offers a gender studies analysis of Laura’s husband, tracing the shifts in the representations of him offered throughout her career. Fishbane concludes that Wilder carefully constructs each version to represent a man who wants an equal partnership with his wife, thus encourag[ing] readers to redefine traditional notions of marriage.

Part 3, Wilder, Plains Studies, and the American Literature Canon, places Wilder’s novels in conversation with works by other canonical American authors, including Ole Rølvaag, Willa Cather, Wallace Stegner, and Hamlin Garland. Contributors offer innovative models for reconfiguring the canon of US literature to more fully include Wilder’s works, simultaneously granting scholars greater context for thinking about, constructing scholarship on, and teaching such texts. In Mobile Stickers and the Specter of Snugness: Pa’s Place-Making in Dakota Territory, Lindsay R. Stephens draws from Stegner’s foundational distinction between boomers and stickers, arguing that Pa Ingalls, then, is not strictly a boomer but rather a place-making opportunist with boomer tendencies—in other words, what I conceive as a sticker in motion, seeking refuge for his family even as his area of influence expands to encompass the De Smet community. Drawing on Diane Quantic’s scholarship on space and place in Plains literature, Stephens argues that sticking and place-making are central concerns in the Dakota novels, with Pa’s strategies of music, snugness, mobility, and community becoming markedly more complex.

In ‘More Than Grassy Hills’: Land, Space, and Female Identity in Laura Ingalls Wilder and Willa Cather, Elif S. Armbruster uses Edward Soja’s concept of Thirdspace to consider space and place in Wilder’s and Cather’s work. Focusing on Wilder’s On the Banks of Plum Creek and By the Shores of Silver Lake along with Cather’s O Pioneers! and My Ántonia, Armbruster argues that in these novels, girls and women who might have felt dwarfed by the vast landscape instead feel inspired and empowered by it. While Cather and Wilder focus on white female characters, eliding the experience of Native peoples, these novels nonetheless provide young women with new ways of being in the world. Armbruster asserts, Cather’s women and Wilder’s Laura sever themselves from the conventional, feminine, and domestic realms, which they experience as limited. As a result, like the space itself, they are ‘always becoming’ … : each moment out-of-doors presents them with a new experience in which they can actively participate. Rather than becoming more traditionally domesticated, like Cather’s heroines, Wilder’s Laura retains an essential, spiritual connection to the natural world throughout the series.

In Breathing Literary Lives from the Prairie: Laura Ingalls Wilder and the Promises of Rural Women’s Education in the Little House Series, Jericho Williams examines Laura’s identity as both a schoolteacher and a newly married woman, focusing on Little Town on the Prairie, These Happy Golden Years, and The First Four Years. Williams highlights Wilder’s depiction of education as empowering to girls living in rural areas, providing a representation that significantly contrasts with Garland’s characterization of Rose Dutcher in Rose of Dutcher’s Coolly (1895) and Cather’s portrayal of Thea Kronborg in The Song of the Lark (1915). Cather and Garland assert that rural life is confining for creative, intelligent women, and insist that these heroines can find fulfillment only in cities far from their rural hometowns. However, Wilder’s books disrupt the belief that rural life created uneducated, uninformed women and redefine the purpose of rural women’s education, offering an alternative view of womanhood that advocates the mastery of traditional and nontraditional literacies as a path to personal fulfillment.

In the final essay in part 3, The Undergraduate American Studies Classroom: Teaching American Myths and Memories with Laura Ingalls Wilder, Christiane E. Farnan positions Wilder’s works alongside the writings of Mary Rowlandson, Thomas Jefferson, and J. Hector St. John de Crèvecoeur and within theoretical frameworks created by Henry Nash Smith: As the course examines the creation and perpetuation of models, memories, and myths of the American Dream through the cultural modification of America’s changing landscape, the looming mythic/historic figure of the American farmer is central to our analysis. While acknowledging the perspectives of many Wilder critics that the Little House books are problematic in their exceptionalism and nostalgia, Farnan asserts that Wilder’s representation of the American farmer, particularly in the series’ early novels, demonstrates a … complicated, multifaceted stance in relation to the American Dream. Investigating the novels’ depictions of and attitudes toward mechanical and technological innovation, Farnan then reads Little House on the Prairie through the lens of Rowlandson’s captivity narrative, aligning the terror of the unknown on the Kansas prairie with the terror of the unknown New England forest, highlighting Wilder’s novel as the narrative of a white woman and her children vulnerably dependent on an irresponsible, imprudent white man.

The essays in part 4, Cultural and Intercultural Wilder, explore the ways the Little House series is imbricated within American tourism, Native relationships to and perspectives on the lands that serve as the series’ settings, and Japanese adaptations and extensions of Wilder’s writings and culture.

Focusing primarily on Wilder sites in Walnut Grove, Minnesota, and De Smet, South Dakota, Anna Thompson Hadjik writes in The Wilder Mystique: Antimodernism, Tourism, and Authenticity in Laura Ingalls Wilder Country that the phenomenon of Laura Ingalls Wilder–related tourism [and] her enduring cultural currency [are] connected to the still salient role of frontier nostalgia in popular culture, involving conservative interpretations of American history, the complex relationship between heritage and tourism, and the search for authenticity on the American landscape. Hajdik examines the continuing appeal that these tourist sites hold for fans. Positioning the Wilder-related locales alongside comparable attractions including New Salem, Illinois (home of young Abraham Lincoln), and Plimoth Plantation in Massachusetts, Hajdik considers how the Wilder sites distinctively configure authenticity and engender nostalgia. She concludes that small tourism industries in Walnut Grove, De Smet, and other Wilder-related communities are also indicative of a postindustrial economy that prioritizes experience, recreation, and commodification over the industrial capitalism of an earlier age. Her essay particularly resonates because of the wealth of interviews she conducted with owners, employees, and neighbors of the sites as well as the tourists who continue to visit them.

While also attending to locations in which the Ingalls family sojourned, Margaret Noodin offers an alternate perspective on those places and the people who have populated them. Her essay, A Little Place in the Universe: An Ojibwe, Osage, and Dakota View of Laura Ingalls, offers a model through which to reread and review the series from the perspective of the cultures Wilder was shaped by yet never fully explored. Drawing on the cultural practices and perspectives of the diverse tribes that occupied the lands on which

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